AEVUM - 2017 - 1

The Idyll XII is the soliloquy of an old man who loves – not loved as he would like – a young man. The old man begins showing the delight of a moment procured by the partner, just come back after an absence of a few days; but, starting from the l. 10, it is clear that the main theme of the idyll is the lack of reciprocity between the beloved, fickle, and the lover, deeply in love with his young partner.

In contrast to the majority opinion adopted by the historians (i.e. the Acarnanian Confederacy was dissolved during the middle of the Third Century B.C., following the division of the region between the Reign of Epirus and Aetolia, and then reconstructed from 230 B.C.), this work tries to demonstrate that Akarnania always existed as a Federal State during the third century B.C. and that the changes and transformations that can be observed during that period are due not to a process of reconstruction but to the vitality, flexibility and strength that characterized the Greek Federal States.

The origin, characteristics and development of Greek wall paintings in architectural style will be examined with special attention to the real imitation of the masonry and to the technique, suggesting a redefinition of some denominations now out of date, but still used.

The aim of this paper is to reflect on the laudatio Porciae, an oratio scripta, written by Cicero to praise Porcia, Cato of Utica’s sister, on her son’s Domitius request and her nephew Brutus. Since there is no part of this eulogy it is only possible to suppose its contents, basing on the characteristics of the others feminine laudationes known of the I century B.C. In this way, it seems also very useful to make a comparison with a piece of a letter written by Cicero, in which he quotes the spontaneous abortion of Tertulla, Cassius’ wife and Brutus’ sister. Both Porcia and Tertulla belonged to Cato’s family and they got married with filo-republican politicians. According to this perspective, their function of trait d’union between politically famous families at the time arises, above all through maternity, making them praiseworthy.

In this article, I examine one of the numerous loci vexati that make difficult, even today, the correct reading of the description of Varro’s Aviary in the third book On agriculture. It concerns the distribution of the water for the birds kept in the porticoes situated in the courtyard of the Aviary. In this case, the return to the humanistic editions, and in particular to those of Pier Vettori published by Sebastien Gryphe in Lyon (1541 and 1543) allowed us to understand that it is an error of punctuation which is at the origin of the erroneous interpretation of the passage in all the modern editions.

The role of Arcadia in Virgil’s Eclogues has received great attention, from the interpretations that considered the Virgilian poems the origin of Arcadia as locus amoenus to most critical and current hypothesis that mark the distance between the Western tradition of Arcadia felix and Virgil’s poems. Reality is that Virgil’s Arcadia is still a very powerful and partly distorted image from the historical point of view. I therefore think that it is necessary to continue with the critical view of the Virgilian Arcadia, redefining the use of Arcadia in the poems of Virgil, remodeling his role in the construction of the mythical image of Arcadia and analyzing the role played by god Pan in the choice of Arcadia as a poetic reference in the Roman world.

The purpose of this study is to examine, from a rational point of view, the story occurred in the year 42 BC and related by Pliny and Suetonius. According to these roman authors, a very young Livia Drusilla (future wife of Octavius) at the age of 15-16 years and being pregnant carried out and oomantic ceremony, in order to guess the sex of the child she was carrying and make sure it was a boy. For this purpose the narration says that she had taken a chicken egg – as a simulation of the fetus – which had been incubated within her, extra corpore, until it hatched out showing a baby-bird with an enormous red cockscomb. This image was a sign referred to the baby who was coming to life: Tiberius. In political terms, we retroactively situate the formation of this genethliacal myth in the year 2 AD, coinciding with the return of the emperor Tiberius back to Rome from his voluntary exile in Rhodes, “the golden island”. This episode operates as a metaphor for a “new birth” and for its incorporation, initially unfortunate, to the political scene.

At the beginning of his reign, Nero had to face a difficult political situation, due to the ambitions of his mother Agrippina and the efforts of some members of the domus Augusta (the proconsul of Asia Marcus Junius Silanus and especially the freedman Narcissus) to replace him with Claudius’ natural son, Britannicus. This paper considers all available evidence in an attempt to explain how Nero defeated his enemies without losing the support of senators and praetorians, until he obtained the title pater patriae.

This paper offers the first ever comprehensive philological and historical commentary on Josephus’ references to Idumea and the Idumeans in Antiquitates Iudaicae books XIIXX, that still remains our main source of knowledge on Hellenistic and early-Roman Idumea. Josephus’ version of the beginnings of the Maccabean-Idumean hostilities, as well as his account of the Hasmonean final conquest of Idumea, stresses the political and military aspects of this conflict (control of mountain approaches to Judea and important trade routes in the region). Furthermore, although Josephus’ accounts of the incorporation of Idumea into the Hasmonean state speak of forcible conversion, the overall message of Josephus’ references to Idumea  eave room for speculation that the incorporation may have been, to some extent, a result of a political agreement between the Hasmoneans and the Idumean elites, and the “conversion”
was a cultural process rather than a strictly religious phenomenon.

During the archaeological excavations in Sremska Mitrovica (Serbia) in 1970, at the site of Roman Sirmium, a fragmentary marble tombstone was excavated at the Christian cemetery of Sirmian martyr St. Sуneros/Serenus. The tombstone bears an inscription which reveals that Marturius held a position of a cupbearer of Emperor Constans I (337-350). The name of the emperor is based on the reading Constanti | inperatori (lines 3-4; adnominal dative). The inscription is significant because it is one of the few epigraphic confirmations of the title pincerna, the position well-established in the late Roman and medieval imperial courts.

In his panegyric for the third consulship of Honorius, Claudian compares the emperor, willing to fight alongside Theodosius, to a young lion that despises its mother’s nurture and goes hunting with its father. This simile shows verbal echoes of and structural parallels with an epic simile between a cub and the hero Parthenopaeus in Statius’s Thebaid. Nevertheless, significant differences may well be noted; for instance, while Statius draws his comparison in a tragic atmosphere, Claudian intends to extol Honorius’s bravery and indirectly to praise Theodosius. Horace’s simile between Drusus and a young lion in Carm. IV 4 has a similar function: his praise for Drusus is aimed at Augustus. Claudian recalls Horace’s ode also through the lexical reference fulva mater and the allusion to the growth of the cub’s teeth. Last, both Claudian’s and Horace’s poems could be considered as belonging to the epinician genre.

In the history of dogma, Ambrose of Milan is considered one of the misericordes Fathers of the Church, on the basis of his views on men’s afterlife. His spiritual doctrine, however, is grounded on the very idea of misericordia and his reflections are rooted in Ambrose’s political experience. The most fruitful element of his views comes from the dialectical and synthetic relationship between iudicium (iustitia) and misericordia. The link with God’s plan in regard to the creation offers a key to understand the point. Misericordia allows to detect a feature of divine love that men cannot perceive within the Holy Trinity: a descending relationship towards the limit. Misericordia is not a mere pathos, but a constitutive element of justice, which operates within the limit: for this reason, Ambrose maintains that misericordia is necessary for man to build human society, not only to gain a place in heaven. Finally, misericordia is an active communitarian virtue, typically ecclesiastical.

At the beginning of 467 AD, Procopius Anthemius came to Italy to be elected emperor. He was Greek and his origins were accepted with suspicion by many people in the western Roman Empire. Despite the distrust that we can effectively find in several sources, the name of Anthemius was seen as the best choice by the senate of Rome. In fact, he not only provided massive financial support for the military campaign against the Vandals but also counterbalanced the excessive power recently gained by Ricimer. The accession of Anthemius therefore represents a turning point: after the death of the aristocratic emperor Libius Severus, a large part of the senate chose to loose their ties with the barbarian patricius praesentalis and sought a new harmony with the eastern Roman Empire.

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